Local News
Stephen Paul Gale, 73, evaded police for over three decades until his capture in 2024, the DA said.
Stephen Paul Gale, the suspect identified through DNA in a decades old double rape case at a Hit or Miss store in Framingham, is wheeled into Courtroom 440 at Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn. Art IIllman/MetroWest Daily News
The man behind a long-unsolved Framingham rape case was convicted Monday of rape and sexual assault charges, prosecutors announced.
Stephen Paul Gale, 73, was convicted on four counts of aggravated rape, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of armed robbery for the sexual assault of two women in 1989.
Gale is scheduled to be sentenced on March 30, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a press release Tuesday.
Gale evaded police for more than three decades, taking up multiple identities and moving across the country, Boston.com previously reported.
Modernized DNA technology led to Gales’ capture. Los Angeles police found Gale living on a luxury yacht, where he led police on a 82-minute car chase through the city, prosecutors said.
“Despite all of the effort devoted to this case when it occurred, the technology simply did not exist to identify the perpetrator. Those advances in technology, coupled with the persistence of all involved brought us to today,” Ryan said.
On Dec. 27, 1989, Gale entered a Framingham Hit or Miss store, at the time a popular discount women’s clothing store, just as the two victims — then aged 18 and 29 — were opening the store for the day, the DA said.
Gale asked the two employees for help before pulling a handgun on them, prosecutors said.
Gale was accused of forcing the victims to the back of the store, where he instructed one woman to take money from a safe, a cash register, and her wallet and place the money into a bag, Ryan’s office said. Gale made the other woman lock the store’s doors and display a sign on the front door saying the establishment would open late, prosecutors said.
Gale then coerced the victims into removing their clothing. He confined the women into two separate rooms and raped both of them, holding a gun to their heads, the DA said. Eventually, believing Gale had left, the women fled out the store’s back door to a nearby home.
While investigating the assaults, police developed a DNA profile, the DA said.
After Framingham police signed a contract with Parabon Nanolabs in 2022, authorities could use investigative genetic genealogy to investigate the case, Ryan’s office said.
Investigators eventually obtained DNA from known members of Gale’s family and compared it to evidence obtained from the scene in 1989, the Middlesex DA said.
Gale was identified as a suspect in May of 2024 and arrested three months later.
When police tried to arrest Gale, he led police on an 82-minute-long car chase through Los Angeles spanning 40 miles, the DA said. Gale was ultimately arrested and brought back to Massachusetts.
“For those still waiting for answers, our commitment remains clear: we will revisit the past, pursue every lead, and continue to seek answers. When a crime occurs here we do not forget and we do not give up,” Ryan said.
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